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Rick Joyner has been pushing fears that Christianity and Islam may merge into a religion known as “Chrislam,” and is now trying to make it an election issue. According to Joyner, Obama is a leader of Liberation Theology; an “anti-America” movement that he believes promotes “racism” and acts as “a bridge between Christianity and Islam, which would lead Christians to Islam.” The pastor also warned that the political left is under the control of a “deep darkness” promoting “anti-God and anti-biblical positions,” and said evangelicals must prevent the “country’s slide into the abyss of moral and financial destruction.”

He also pushed the myth that Obama gave “Muslims an exemption from the healthcare law.” As FactCheck.org notes: “we can say with certainty that no Muslim group, and indeed no non-Christian group, has ever qualified for an exemption under the statute used to define exempt religious groups in the health care law.”

The religiously unaffiliated, or the “Nones,” are the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, now comprising about one-fifth (19%) of the adult population. Their growth is also evident at the ballot box, where unaffiliated voters now account for a significant slice of the electorate. The unaffiliated vote share in presidential elections more than doubled from 5% in 1980 to 12% in 2008. Currently, PRRI’s 2012 American Values Survey estimates that 16% of likely voters are religiously unaffiliated.

An exploration of the unaffiliated vote since 1980s shows two interesting features: first, the Democratic advantage among this group is not a recent phenomenon but stretches back at least as far as 1984, and second, that unaffiliated voters display unusually robust support for third-party and independent candidates.

After Billy Graham prayed with, and effectively endorsed, Mitt Romney it was pointed out that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website had an article which openly called Mormonism a "cult'. So, the BGEA scrubbed the offending article - but it missed another that identified Mormons as non-Christians, and that wasn't the end of the anti-Mormon animosity - which appears to be built right into the coding of the BGEA website

American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer appeared on CNN today and told host Carol Costello that the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Mix It Up at Lunch Day” program, which the AFA is protesting, is “toxic” to the “moral health” of students, much like “poisoned Halloween candy” injected with cyanide.

After Fischer did his normal routine of arguing that Hitler was gay and that the Stormtroopers were largely comprised of gay members while making wild claims about the supposed dangers of homosexuality, Costello abruptly ended the interview, adding, “thanks for sharing your views, I guess.”

After a tumultuous decade that featured death threats and bullet-proof vests as well as a wedding to his partner of 25 years, Bishop Gene Robinson will be stepping down from his seat on December 31 of this year. But his work continues.

Below are shown statements of abject folly thought by their speaker to be like beacons of truth. But what is shining are the fast-burning flames engulfing banners of scientific literacy that he's destructively set alight with is own idiocy. If followed, they will misdirect utterly, tragically signaling others, even school children if the speaker had his way, into failure: failure to understand the universe, failure to understand human origins, failure to understand the scientific method, failure to appreciate the scope and magnitude of reality, failure to engage with the grand struggles for knowledge in the areas of evolutionary biology, genetics, particle physics, cosmology, astronomy, virology, geology, and several other fields that daily rest upon and prove and prove again the basic tenets of evolution, the basic fact of that there is one--one--only one known scientific explanation for the origin of species, including human beings, and the basic fact that the Earth is very, very old indeed, and the universe older yet.

This yawning gap in knowledge he'll happily and haplessly steer others towards, this shadowy, oceanically massive maw of ignorance he promises can be bridged not by structures of scientific inquiry, correction, and knowledge, but by throwing an something like an idol into the void, a collection of select verses from self-described sacred texts penned in the pre-scientific age of bronze tools.

Science gives you the adventure of curiosity and curiosity channeled toward problem-solving, question-answering, and accumulating knowledge that can be shared and can grow. It can literally take you to the moon and let you gaze into the hearts of stars; it can let you see the past by reading the stories of Earth's rocks and even those of other worlds. It can make you marvel and the limits of imagination and knowledge as you're confronted with the limitless but utterly approachable and almost certainly solvable mysteries of the cosmos.

But this man says curiosity is overrated compared to a few words--most of them in a book called Genesis and all of which could all be read in minutes--which are supposed to direct or even completely satisfy a lifetime of curiousity and settle in some fundamental way all questions you and any American school student might have about where species come from and what is the natural history of our planet and universe.

And the man who makes these statements is a member of Congress.

And he sits on the House of Representatives' Science Committee.

What he says disqualifies him for any such seat. That his constituents are not shamefaced is a profound indictment upon them. What he says is an embarrassment. Yet...he is a policy-influencer and lawmaker especially as policy and law relate to science.

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) tore into scientists as tools of the devil in a speech at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet last month.

“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” Broun said. “And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”

According to Broun, the scientific plot was primarily concerned with hiding the true age of the Earth. Broun serves on the House Science Committee, which came under scrutiny recently after another one of its Republican members, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), suggested that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses against pregnancy.

“You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth,” he said. “I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”

Americans United staff members have carefully researched [the Religious Right] movement, and here are the 10 Religious Right groups that pose the greatest challenges to church-state separation. Most of these organizations are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code, but the financial data includes some affiliated 501(c)(4) lobbying organizations operating alongside the main organizations. The figures come from official IRS filings or other reliable sources.